displays performance battery life and so
much more laptops are one of the most complicated product categories to test
because until you can evaluate every individual part you can never hope to
see the whole picture which is why it's taking us two years to nail down a
comprehensive test Suite so strap in with some help from our sponsor MSI Who
provided some test subjects for this run through and by the time we're done
you're going to know how our Labs team can help you avoid the trp tops and find
yourself a slap top shipments typically arrive in the afternoon which leaves us
only a few hours to kick things off we start with a quick physical to make sure
that what we got matches what it says on the tin and to clean out any
pre-installed garbage like McAfee or Norton we went back and forth on this
practice quite a bit and ultimately what we decided was that it was best for us
to test the hardware without it being influenced by a performance sapping
bloat and huh also sometimes it would falsely identify our mark bench
automation software as a virus
so now in a perfect world these are fresh from the factory but every now and
then we'll get a review sample that's been passed around so we'll do a full
system reset then we'll write down the default power profile before changing it
to the most battery economical mode in this case super battery then we Chuck it
into our 20° environmental test chamber fully charged and we go go home to
rejuvenate our mortal shells endurance testing typically needs to run overnight
because it can take a very long time depending on the system we use 720p
YouTube video playback at a usable but
fairly dim 200 nits with 100% display
scaling and we make sure to turn off any keyboard RGB for our endurance test
Hardware info is used for logging which we found is lightweight enough to only
negligibly impact our tests
then we pull it out dead as a door nail
man this stealth 18 AI studio is smaller
than its name especially when you factor in the core Ultra 9 185h and RTX 480 in
here sheesh now these sponsored MSI laptops are just for demonstration
purposes for this video we're going to be publishing our independent
non-sponsored test results at LTT Labs.com the reason we test like this
isn't because don't trust manufacturers I mean we don't but not necessarily
because we think they're all liars sometimes they are but even the best
intentioned manufacturers rarely agree with each other on how to test their
devices and if you dig into the fine print you'll find all kinds of
interesting choices like nigh unusable
brightness levels disabled wireless connectivity or a battery life test
where they do nothing but display a desktop background that's why we create
created our own set of criteria that we feel the average person would agree
represents sure economical but actual
realworld use of the device we also have a second test to give you guys a range
that looks at how well it'll handle a full stress situation on top of our
maximum endurance test by the way in the future once we get our Pam or power
analysis module we'd like to incorporate charge times as well as discharge times
speaking of charging while it's getting reenergize we determine what sort of
weight class our laptop sits in you'd think that we could do this with just
specs but without going on a 2hour rant we can't so what we do is we pop it back
into the Ed box performance mode and make sure that the Windows power mode is
set to best performance for consistency sake after that we run a quick 1080p
Total War Warhammer 3 Benchmark which uses a good mix of CPU and GPU that we
can use to determine what tests we should bother with for example if we're
looking at Netbook that's scores under 20 FPS or just straight up dnfs will
focus on lighter Esports titles rather than wasting time on cyberpunk in the
case of the Titan 18hx with an Intel Core i 94900 HX 128 GB of ddr5 memory
and an RTX 4090 mobile GPU will be looking at numbers so high we can assume
that Dota 2 runs fine and move on to other things it also lets us know if
something appears to be faulty for instance we test a laptop that we think
should be somewhere in the heavyweight or middleweight tier but ends up performing more like a featherweight
then before we do any more rigorous testing we'll dig around and find the
roote cost sometimes they're from storefronts like Ali Express and they
just plain suck sometimes it's old stock with dried out thermal paste and then
sometimes it's just a really slow laptop
either way it gives us a really good idea of what to expect once the unit's
recharged we'll do a couple of quick battery stress tests before moving on to
gaming Max brightness refresh rate keyboard RGB on full blast you know
whatever the maxed out power mode is the whites we'll hit it with prime 95 for
CPU only devices as well as a combuster workload for a simulated gaming load on
our gaming laptops then comes our suite of gaming benchmarks courtesy of mark
bench this automated system runs what we call harnesses which are created on a
perame basis using either canned benchmarks that are built into the game
or our own custom playthroughs it gives us reliable easily graph data and what's
cool is it can even handle some productivity tests like cinebench 2024
and Puget benches Premier Pro and Photoshop benchmarks 3D marks storage
test and UL proon office productivity aren't in mark bench yet but we are
working on them and together all of these numbers give us a clear picture of
the machine's performance both in gaming and in general usability this is all
done with the fans running in whatever
profile they're set to out of the box and the goal here is to record the
typical non- tinker and user experience
now we have observed cases where we might get a few more FPS with the
cooling system cranked 211 but what we
suspect is that most people want their laptop to stay firmly planted on the
table instead of taking off and hovering though if the fans happen to creep up to
uncomfortable levels on their own well hey that's just part of the
manufacturer's design it's worth mentioning here that non-battery
performance testing is currently performed out in the open in the lab not
in the environmental chamber it's not as strictly managed but it is still a
controlled thermal environment thanks to our Central HVAC system and it sits
around 21 de C for an example of what
some of our testing data might look like here's some runs on our Titan 18hx from
MSI at 1080P 1440p and
2400px at least in part to MSI's over boost Ultra which unlocks a whopping 270
watts of total system power and things get even more interesting if you look at
CPU only tasks like cine bench 2024
without the GPU sucking up valuable resources our CPU rocketed up to 200 100
watts of power consumption giving this machine very respectable numbers for a
laptop chip I mean it's hard to quite achieve desktop performance in a
portable form factor but this shows about how close we can get at what cost
though let's head back to the environmental chamber and talk about
heat back at the chamber after fighting with Lucas on who gets to use it for the
day we make sure that our machine under test is plugged in for maximum
performance and then we run it through a series of stress tests with 10-minute
braks in between so it can cool off currently we use a set of 15minute
thermal load tests using cinnam bench for raw CPU furmark for raw GPU and then
both a f-120 3 loop as well as combuster
GL msi2 physx CPU set to medium for both
a real world as well as synthetic combined load test with that said we are
still experimenting to determine the ideal methodology here we know that
there are power viruses that can run the components harder but no one in the
right mind is finding new prime numbers of a laptop so leave a like if you think
that the current system is good or a comment if you think you have other
ideas looking at our results modern core I9 mobile chips can get hot and our
Titan 18hx is no exception even with its
Vapor chamber cooling design however in modern devices that are basically
designed to throttle the more important metric to look at is sustained clock
speed which we report on a graph that looks like this for gamers a combined
workload like our f123 Loop is a better representation of how the cooling system
is going to handle a typical gaming load now one step that we'd love to add in
the future is a set of thermal imaging shots from a Fleer camera while any
device is at its peak thermal load this would tell us whether all the heat is SA
sailing comfortably out of the vents at the back or whether it's being conducted
through your poor delicate fies give us
time though um another two years who
knows any who speaking of with all the
design delays not to mention permit delays our full-fledged anoa chamber is
going to be a while so we built this quiet room as a placeholder now you guys
know from experience that some devices can practically scream in pain as they
try to stay cool so we're going to be using this to both test devices and
speakers and what's cool is even in its
current temporary State it's so quiet nobody can hear me
scream oh that's not how it works lonus
it is not how it works you told me I could scream in here yeah but I can hear
you just fine uh uh look Gary Arc go my
Ark my Ark there are still a few more things
that we need to do to get our noise flow lower but we're currently measuring
about 23 DB in this bad boy which is low
enough that we can comfortably evaluate underload Acoustics for all but the
quietest of devices our mic sits roughly
2 feet from the screen which is about where someone would be using a laptop
and then we look at as much of the fan noise curve as we can depending on the
available operating modes we're not going to be actually publishing numbers
from here yet this foam is just some temporary crap that we ordered from
Amazon on this is garbage we're going to be replacing it and we have some work to
do on our methodology but we're going to make an announcement once we change out
to both the finished version of this
chamber and the full one moving on to speakers our stelle
studio here has a six- speaker surround sound system that's tuned by Dine Audio
with two pairs of dual Force cancelling woofers that's a fancy way of saying
that it should look pretty good on our testing mic speaking of looking good
that's why our team here wears only the best merch from LTT Store.com like these
new Labs phase hoodies next up is my favorite part
display testing for laptops it's almost exactly the same as testing any other
display so we hook up our stealth 18 AI Studio to the network in a darkened room
like this one and launch calman client 3 while another laptop right here runs
calman ultimate from portrait displays we then carefully position our cr300 and
CR 100 colorimeters these guys measure 10% window sized color swatches to check
for accuracy color gamut capabilities and brightness by the way you might have
heard us say this display has an average Delta e2000 of two or three or something
along those lines well while that's great for measuring SDR content more and
more displays are featuring proper HDR or high dynamic range so we're in the
middle of transitioning over to Delta eitp to paint a better picture of what
that experience looks like anyway that whole conversation is well beyond the
scope of this video for now testing is done in this office upstairs is where
we've hung some black dutin and blocked the automatic light sensor with paper
and tape this is what it looks like without any of our lights turned on
eventually the plan is to have a full media room where we'll test displays and
put some couches a big projector for some subjective audio evaluation as well
Rome wasn't built in a day beyond color accuracy gamut and brightness we use an
lat as well as an osrt to measure response time and latency whenever
supported we take Pursuit motion photos using smooth frog to check for ghosting
or inverse ghosting for subjective analysis and if there are local dimming
zones most common on mini LED displays or an OLED where every pixel is a
dimming Zone we calculate how many there are and take a look at how much Bloom
they cause once the testing is complete we're able to spit out indecipherable
numbers like these that some of you have asked us to explain let's use the 4K
120hz mini LED that's on both of our demo machines to explore brightness our
stealth 18 AI studio hit around 1,00
nits of peak brightness in a 10% window in game gamer mode that means that you
can expect a high contrast and Poppy HDR
experience as dimming zones light up for flashes of light and explosions while
other zones in darker parts of the scene stay dim the total nits value indicates
how bright those spots are with a higher value meaning A Brighter Image it goes
deeper than that just like color accuracy goes deeper than smaller number
better but to learn more you're just going to have to stay tuned for a tech
quickie MSI also wanted us to test the ultra low profile mechanical keyboard on
the Titan 18hx but due to some setbacks we can't quite test laptop keyboards yet
we can get an accurate scan and our robot works great now that's like 90% of
the battle but our logging software runs
on a separate device so that's great for Standalone keyboards but we still need
to develop a way to set up low latency input pass through Rome built etc etc
stay tuned same goes for our EMC Chamber from Raymond EMC we expect to be able to
test Wi-Fi sometime in about Q3 but with
that said Wi-Fi 6 and 6c have already been a substantial improvement over
previous versions with stable and fast connections being pretty affordable
these days and seven is even stronger so it's relatively safe to say that if
you're buying a device with Wi-Fi 6 and above you're probably going to be okay
for typical web browsing and video call use uh barring any annoying driver
issues mediate Tech excuse me sorry
I know this whole thing has been a long time coming and the videos on short
circuit might not go into enough detail for some of you at least not yet but
that is where LTT Labs.com is going to come into play the site is up it's
getting regular content updates now and the goal is to have every product that
comes into our warehouse go through our lab for testing to determine whether
it's worth your hard-earned money before it makes it any further massive thanks
to MSI for sending over these guinea pigs and for sponsoring our efforts to
keep them honest we're going to have all the
laptops that we showed off today Linked In the description down below as well as
the LTT lab's website go check it out and leave some feedback for our team now
based on MSI's usual feedback they probably want some more screen time for
their devices so here we go whether you
need the ultimate gaming and Engineering laptop or a portable desktop replacement
MSI's Titan series devices have got you covered a little too much power for you
we look no further than their r gaming laptops or for something smaller that
still packs on major punch try the stealth 18 AI Studio complete with the
latest meteor Lake processors from Intel you can check out all of these at the
link in the video description thanks for watching if you guys enjoyed this video
and you want to know more about how the lab is being utilized maybe sign up on
Floatplane we've got an hour plus long video that goes over exactly that